Why UX should guide AI

Guest post by Julia Hintz and Leif-Nissen Lundbæk in VentureBeat

Have you ever spent more than 50 minutes picking a movie, only for the movie to last 77 minutes? We sure have. Algorithms behind these streaming services, however, are much better at this task than us humans. They pick out movies based on your previous watch history and are part of a branch of AI called radical specialisation. This makes them unbeatable in single tasks, like movie picking. Considering this statement performance-wise, it is an outstanding result, but looking at this outcome from a user experience point of view, our perception might be different. Since the convenience arising from them lulls us into a dangerous cult of AI that gradually pushes our human needs out of the picture.

You might ask yourself, okay, but how can we stop this from going on? Ah! It's good you asked. Realising what is happening is the first part on the way to change. As we can see, this latest fusion of AI and UX is not working for or society. The only way we to change our direction from this path is to let AI be AI and to let humans be humans. The meaning of this is not to abolish this unity, but to allow users, us humans, to be able to be in control of our algorithms and to ask for our feedback on their performance.

In their latest guest post for VentureBeat(“Why UX should guide AI” June, 2021) our CEO, Leif-Nissen Lundbæk (PhD) and our Head of Design, Julia Hintz dive deep into the relationship between AI and UX – discussing the pros & cons and does & don’ts, and informing us about how the world of AI and UX is changing our lives and the way we think.

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Originally published in VentureBeat on June 20th 2020